Saturday, December 26, 2015

Julian Assange. Transcript pertaining to TPP. DN. 02 Jun 2015.

1.AMY GOODMAN: Despite the Senate vote
approving a measure to give President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate
the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, opposition to the deal continues
to mount ahead of this month’s House vote. Critics, including a number of
Democratic lawmakers, oppose the TPP, saying it will fuel inequality, kill
jobs, and undermine health, environmental and financial regulations. The
negotiations have been secret, and the public has never seen most of the deal’s
text. Well, this morning, the whistleblowing group WikiLeaks launched a
campaign to change that. The group is seeking to raise
$100,000 to offer what they describe as a bounty for the leaking of the unseen
chapters of the TPP. WikiLeaks just posted this video online.

2.NARRATOR:WikiLeaks
is raising a $100,000 reward for the missing chapters on America’s most wanted
secret: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And this is why.

3.PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: TPP is for
American businesses, American businesses, businesses, businesses.

4.MIKE SYNAN: It’s called the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, and it might not sound important to you, until you hear Democrats
railing against their own president and saying your job could be on the line.

5.SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Who will benefit
from the TPP?

6.LORI WALLACH: It is enforceable corporate
global governance.

7.THOM HARTMANN: It is a giant giveaway to
monster transnational corporations.

8.SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Wall Street,
pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at
the chance to rig the upcoming trade deals in their favor.

9.NARRATOR:All 29
chapters of the TPP are secret, but three of them have been WikiLeaked. So what
do we know so far?

10.THOM HARTMANN: The United States has
negotiated the TPP almost entirely in secret, with the help of about 600
private corporations.

11.NARRATOR:The TPP
is a multitrillion-dollar treaty that is being negotiated behind closed doors
by the Obama administration. They say it’s a free trade deal, but in reality it
is anything but free. And 80 percent of it isn’t even about trade.

12.MELINDA ST. LOUIS: There are 29 chapters.
Only five of them have to do with trade. They have to do with our freedom on
the Internet. They have to do with the financial regulation, of food and
product safety.

13.NARRATOR:The
treaty covers nearly half of the world’s economy and is the largest ever
negotiated. It will have implications beyond matters of trade, intruding into
almost every aspect of people’s lives. The TPP bans favoring local businesses.
Experts say it will send millions of jobs overseas and drive down wages and
conditions at home. Multinational corporations will be able to sue the
government for passing laws, including on the environment and health
protections that they claim affect their expected future profit.

14.JOHN OLIVER: That’s right. A company was able
to sue a country over a public health measure through an international court.How the
[bleep] is that possible? Philip Morris International, a company with annual net
revenues of $80 billion, basically threatened to sue Togo, whose entire GDP is
$4.3 billion. Togo, justifiably terrified by threats of billion-dollar
settlements, backed down from a public health law that many people wanted. And
it’s not just Togo. Two tobacco companies sued Australia in its highest court.
Philip Morris International is currently suing Uruguay. British American
Tobacco sent a similar letter to Namibia, ... the Solomon Islands.

15.NARRATOR:Pharmaceutical
companies will be allowed to expand their monopolies, restricting the
availability of affordable generic drugs. The TPP requires Internet service
providers to become Internet policemen, watching your every click. It is a
one-way ticket. Once signed, it will be locked in place for decades. But the
scariest thing about the TPP is that there are 26 chapters that cover our daily
lives that we have not seen.

16.AMY GOODMAN: Part of a new video released
by WikiLeaks today. Well, on Memorial Day, I traveled to London and interviewed
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he’s lived
for nearly three years with political asylum. Assange faces investigations in
both Sweden and the United States. I asked him about WikiLeaks’ TPP campaign.

17.JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, we are raising
$100,000, which we think won’t be any problem at all, in pledges, for the 29
chapters of the TPP. Now, we have already obtained four and published four, but
we’d also like updated versions of those four. Now, why is this so important?
This agreement covers 40 percent of the global economy, and it lays the
foundations for a new system of international law that will be embedded in all
the economies involved. And it is a predecessor agreement to something called
the TTIP, which is the U.S.-EU version. So, it’s going—

18.AMY GOODMAN: Called the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment—

19.JULIAN ASSANGE: Partnership.

20.AMY GOODMAN: —Partnership.

21.JULIAN ASSANGE:Yeah,
so this is going to cover more than 60 percent of GDP. And it is the
framework, if it gets through, of international law, and filtering into
domestic law.It is the construction of a new world, a new way of doing
things, a new legal regime. So it’s, in historical terms, the largest-ever such
agreement negotiated. And so that’s the importance. But we also want to also
demonstrate that whistleblowers who give information in relation to this, they
shouldn’t be chased or harassed, they should be celebrated. They should be
celebrated like the Nobel Prize celebrates people who do good work, for the
Nobel Prize. And so, I think we can achieve not just encouragement and incentive
for people to look for such information, but rather, we can award and celebrate
their courage and tenacity in getting a hold of it.

22.AMY GOODMAN: So, in a sense, you’re
saying it’s not paying for the information, but it’s prize money for turning it
over?

23.JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s prize money
for demonstrating the courage and tenacity in finding such information.

24.AMY GOODMAN: Can we go to the issue of
journalism in the United States and how it’s being practiced today when it
comes to whistleblowers, the issue of what it means to get information from a
whistleblower, how you get that information? You have said you feel this is
deeply endangered now and that laws are being considered that would criminalize
journalism.

25.JULIAN ASSANGE: Right. Well, we want to take
a—we also want to take a strong stand in relation to this. Now, the U.S.
government, in terms of its attack on WikiLeaks, has tried to construct a
theory which, if permitted, will be the end of national security journalism,
not just in the United States, but also about the United States. That claim is
that journalists can’t solicit information from sources and to solicit
information is to be involved in a conspiracy. And—

26.AMY GOODMAN: An accomplice to the
conspiracy.

27.JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. And the United
States, in terms of the charge types that it’s trying to charge me with—those
include conspiracy and conspiracy to commit espionage—this is rubbish. We
cannot tolerate this at the political level or the media level. If we do
tolerate it, then that standard will be erected. Then what happens in practice?
How does traditional investigative journalism work? Well, you hear a rumor
about some event occurring. Let’s say it’s an assassination squad assassinating
people. You hear a rumor that there might have been an event, and you go and
speak to your sources, or perhaps one approaches you and says, "I heard
that this happened." And then you say, "Well, that’s good, but we
need to be able to prove it. So do you have information that can prove it?"
And then they say, "Well, I think I might have some report on the
incident." And then you say, "Well, that’s good. Can we have that
report? Can we see that report?" And that’s the way journalism has always
been done. Now, the U.S. DOJ—

28.AMY GOODMAN: That’s the smoking gun.

29.JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s the smoking gun.
That’s—if you see the Edward Snowden case, without that, without those
documents, you don’t get anywhere. If you’ve got that, then they’re undeniable,
if they’re official documents. So, we cannot allow a standard to be erected, in
national security journalism or other forms of investigative journalism, where
that is not permitted, where that is seen to be unlawful. And a number of
journalists, as a result of the DOJ pushing this line that it is unlawful to
solicit tips from sources, have been—to protect themselves, they have said that
they’re not. But as a result, a new standard is being erected—is in danger of
being erected, where you cannot solicit tips from sources.

Now, we even fell
into this mistake back in 2011, 2012, where our situation was quite precarious.
Based on legal advice, WikiLeaks doesn’t solicit information. In fact,
WikiLeaks is one of the few organizations, because of our infrastructure, that
we do often get unsolicited information. But we think it’s necessary to hold
the line and say, "No, asking for tips is a very important thing to do.
It’s always been done in journalism." And we’re going to show that we do
that. We are confident about doing that. We are confident that that is legal, under
most judicial systems, and it should be legal also in the United States—we say
it is legal under the First Amendment. And if the U.S. DOJ wants to have a
fight about that in relation to the TPP or anything else, then bring it on.

30.AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, speaking
inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has taken refuge for the past
three years. I interviewed him on Memorial Day. You can go to democracynow.org
to see the two hours of our exclusive interview [hour one, hour two].

Also go to
democracynow.org for the graduation
speech you weren’t supposed to hear. The response has been tremendous when
we played it yesterday on Democracy Now! And now we’ve posted part
two of our interview with Evan Young, the Colorado charter high school
valedictorian who was barred from speaking at graduation because he was
planning to come out as gay. That’s democracynow.org. When we come back, Cuba.
Stay with us.